Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  The voyages of Columbus were the expression of an ambitious and forward-thinking monarchy, the conquistadors embodied a warrior spirit that reveled in adventure and accepted hardship as a test, but the empire was the result of gold and silver. Without the ore that poured forth from the mines of Mexico and Peru, Spain would have remained a modest European power and not the world-altering behemoth it became. The discovery of the Americas’ wealth transformed the world economy and Spain’s place in it. The amounts are staggering: between 1500 and 1650, approximately 180 tons of gold flowed through the official port of Seville, so much that the entranceway that connected it to the royal palace where Philip IV impatiently awaited the arrival of his treasure was known as “the Golden Doorway.” Gold animated the dreams of the explorers, conquistadors, merchants, and pirates, but it was the 16,000 tons of silver (worth at least $3.7 billion in current dollars) that Spain extracted from American mines that allowed for uniform coins to be made and distributed throughout the world, revolutionizing (in fact, one might say, creating) the global economy. In 1535, Spain decreed that a mint be established in Mexico City, and a year later the production of rough silver cobs began, using crude dies and a sledgehammer and then, in 1732, a minting machine. During its useful life, the mint produced 2.68 billion silver coins; merchants and common people were soon using them for buying everything from a bushel of corn to a shipload of Chinese ceramics. Even in the American colonies, the Spanish piece of eight was more popular and plentiful than were English notes; the currency issued by the Continental Congress were denominated in “Spanish Milled Dollars.” Fueled by a universal currency, worldwide trade exploded, and the gold and silver streaks arced across the oceans like sparks from a Roman candle. Ships from the Atlantic seaboard to Shanghai and everywhere in between traded on the new commercial sea routes, exchanging pieces of eight or silver ingots for Colombian emeralds, French muskets, and indigo from the ancient woods of the Caribbean. “The king of China could build a palace with the silver bars from Peru which have been carried to his country,” wrote an official in the Philippines. The value of the treasure taken from the Americas during the Spanish reign ranges from $4 to $6 billion in unadjusted dollars; its present-day worth would be many times that.

  By the time that Penn and Venables sailed, however, the Spanish dream of universal monarchy was growing confused and dark. Fernand Brandel called the empire of Philip II “un total de faiblesses,”—“a total of weaknesses”—and by the mid-1600s they were everywhere to be seen. The reasons were many and complicated, but in the end Spain was radically overextended: Every mile of territory that was conquered had to be pacified, guarded, supplied, administered, and, once any treasure was carted off, made self-sustaining. As the decades passed, it seemed that everyone was benefiting except the Spanish: The Crown was forced to borrow huge amounts from the Genoese financiers who underwrote the galleon fleets; when the ships returned from the New World, brimming with escudos and pearls, the majority would be parceled out to lenders across Europe, leaving only a small percentage for the Crown’s actual operating costs. “Everything comes down to one thing,” sighed Philip II. “Money and more money.” The king’s 1584 income was estimated at 6 million pesos; his debts totaled nearly 74 million. By the time of Philip IV, the kingdom was in even worse shape. Foreign affairs absorbed a staggering 93 percent of the budget. The kingdom was dependent on the treasure of the West Indies to support its empire, and Philip’s European armies waited for the galleons’ arrival to march. On October 4, 1643, the king wrote a correspondent that the silver fleet had arrived and the money had instantly been used “to dispose my forces.” Other times he tied the galleons even more closely to the fate of Spain. “We are expecting hourly, by God’s help, the arrival of the galleons,” he wrote, “and you may imagine what depends on it for us. I hope that, in His mercy, He will bring them safely…. It is true, I do not deserve it, but rather great punishment; but I have full confidence that He will not permit the total loss of this monarchy….” Any disturbance in the flow of gold could threaten the very existence of the empire.

  The treasure of the New World had acted like a steroid on the empire, expanding it beyond its natural dimensions. And the king depended on it like a drug. Jealous of the source, he wouldn’t let non-Spaniards set foot in the Americas or trade with their inhabitants. The empire ballooned, but the Spanish mind closed in on itself. Religious fervor hardened into ceremony; the vast bureaucracy stifled ambition; a rigidly hierarchical society replicated itself in all its colonies. To take only the humblest example of the iron bureaucracy that ruled men’s lives in the empire: In Panama or Havana, poor men needed state-approved licenses simply to beg on the streets. No human activity escaped the hand of tradition and state control. The empire had shut itself off to the idea of flexibility and change.

  As their fortunes slowly darkened, the Spanish increasingly felt that God was rebuking them, just as the Bible told them He had the Israelites when they failed to take the promised land of Canaan. The glory days had been an engaño, a trick; the Spanish believed they’d gone from being God’s darling to his bewitched plaything. No one felt the curse more than Philip IV. When news reached Madrid that Jamaica had been lost, Philip was convinced he’d doomed the nation. “The news fell upon Philip like an avalanche,” wrote one historian. “Panic spread through Seville and Cadiz, and curses loud and deep of the falsity of heretics rang through Liars Walk and the Calle Mayor.” England had successfully been kept out of direct conflict with Spain for decades, but now they’d obviously cast their fortunes against their ancient enemy. And the fact that they’d done so in the West Indies, the source of the bright stream of gold and silver that helped sustain the empire, signaled a new opening in the struggle. England had placed itself perfectly “to obstruct the commerce of all the islands to the windward with the coasts of the mainland and of New Spain,” an officer of the court acknowledged. “The fleets and galleons will run great risk in passing Jamaica.”

  Philip tried to maintain his stoic façade in court, but when he wrote to one correspondent, his true emotions came pouring out. His deepest fear, the complete collapse of the empire, would be a distinct possibility if England really entered the fray and seized the American treasure:

  If this should happen it would be the final ruin of this realm; and no human power would be able to stop it: the Almighty hand of God alone could do it; and so I beseech you most earnestly to supplicate Him to take pity upon us, and not to allow the infidels to destroy realms so pure in the faith…. Blessed be his holy name!

  3

  Morgan

  On the island of Jamaica, Philip’s inheritance was not yet lost to the English. A killer’s game of cat and mouse was under way. The Spanish holdouts had retired to the mountains, and the English held the shore and the new town of Cagway; beyond that was enemy territory. To English boys from Coventry or Dover, everything past the tree line or the small town was terrifying: when they’d slept on the shores of Hispaniola at night, the sound of the giant crabs emerging from the ocean and scuttling across the beach had shot them bolt awake; it sounded exactly like the clatter of bullet cartridges on an infantryman. And then there were the fireflies that were mistaken for the lit fuses carried by soldiers to light their muskets. Convinced that the Spanish soldiers were closing in on them, they stayed tense, trigger-happy until dawn. Even after they’d lived on the island for weeks and begun to grow accustomed to its sights and sounds, the beauty of the place turned sinister at night, when the oddly humanlike jabbering of the monkeys crescendoed with birdcalls and unidentifiable screams (animal? human?) to a deafening roar. For all along they knew that their true enemies—the former slaves—were watching.

  Gage had been wrong: The blacks had not turned against the Spanish; they’d disappeared into the jungle and become excellent guerrilla fighters. “They grow bold and bloody,” Major Sedgwick wrote, “a people that know not what the laws and customs of civil nations mean, neither do we know how to capitulat
e or discourse with them, or how to take any of them.” The soldiers could not even find their hiding places and were forced to send to England for hounds. The malnourished survivors of the invasion sent patrols into the bush to smoke out the last of the resistance; when they went in numbers, they were safe. But when hunger tempted a lone Englishman to walk out of the cleared settlement where his mates stood guard with muskets, into the trackless jungle, different rules applied. Tempted by the fish in the streams or the hope of capturing an iguana or guinea hen, a soldier might head out into the bush, then stop and listen. The jungle emitted a stream of snaps, low calls, whirls, and clicks; he understood none of it. He went on. All along, the black guerrilla was tracking him soundlessly, to English eyes a shadow among shadows, sensed but not seen. When the famished soldier at last let down his guard to chase a lizard or hook a fish, something would flash in the corner of his eye, and a machete would cleave his skull from the crown forward.

  Each side knew the stakes. When the English search party would see the vultures circling above and find their dead mate, the mutilations would be gruesome. Officers suffered worse fates: Captured and force-marched to the other side of the island, they’d be interrogated under torture (with methods learned from the masters of the Inquisition), then shipped off to the salt mines of the Main or the dungeons of Cuba, to which death was often preferable. (One captured English soldier told the Spaniards what they wanted to hear: that the Jews of Flanders, recently allowed into England, had financed the invasion—a complete falsehood.) The black guerrillas captured by the whites might face a punishment similar to that dealt out to disobedient slaves on Barbados, reported by an Englishman. The “rebellious negro” was chained flat on his belly and fire was applied to his feet until he was gradually burned to ashes while still alive. Others were starved to death with a loaf of bread hanging just out of reach, and they were known to gnaw the flesh off their own shoulders before dying. It was in this atmosphere that Henry Morgan came of age as a soldier.

  His deliverer—the man whose life had brought Morgan to Jamaica—did not live to see his rise. Thomas Gage succumbed to disease early in 1656; in the records of the Admiralty, his widow successfully applied for back pay in the amount of one pound 6 shillings and 8 fourpence, his last appearance in the ledgers of English foreign affairs. At the end of his book that had led the English nation to the shores of Jamaica, Gage had compared himself to one of the spies sent into the land of Canaan, Moses’s emissaries who had gone in search of the promised land and returned to describe a place filled with milk and honey, with clusters of grapes so large that two men had to carry them. (Gage did not mention that they also told their people of the strongly fortified cities and that “the land through which we have gone as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants.”) He saw himself as the scout for the great Protestant empire soon to rule the New World, and perhaps even a martyr, like his Catholic ancestors. “I am ready to witness with the best drops of blood in my veins,” Gage wrote. “Though true it is that I have been envied, jealousied, and suspected by many.”

  One would be naïve to take him at his word; our last glimpse of Gage brings us closer to his true character. It finds the ex-friar serving as the interpreter for the English commanders as they negotiate the surrender of the Spanish. Surely Hispaniola had been an appalling embarrassment for him; his sunny predictions had cost lives, and he was forced to witness his fellow Protestant crusaders falling left and right. But in the Spanish report on the invasion, he has recovered from any embarrassment, and we find him yelling at the sargento mayor of Santiago de la Vega (later Spanish Town) about insufficient supplies, basically lording it over his old compatriots. The writer’s dislike of the man comes through; he describes Gage as a man full of “noisy menaces” who “took the habit of Saint Dominic…and, ordained a priest, returned to England and fell from the Faith.” When the Spanish claimed that Jamaica belonged to them, having been granted to them by Pope Alexander and occupied for 140 years, Gage shot back that Cromwell had taken the island for the English and that “not right, but might of arms gave them possession,” tossing in that the pope had failed to snatch away Henry VIII’s realm when the king turned against him and adding “other blasphemous, licentious words.” At this the Englishmen began laughing.

  Gage had come to the Americas in search of a religious crusade, but he little realized that the war he was relishing would take a far different shape: It would be a confrontation not between two traditional faiths but between two radically different visions of men and society. Cromwell’s “banners of Christ” had been folded up and put away; in their place would come the flag of the pirates, whose way of life was utterly foreign to both Catholics and Protestants. Port Royal would not mark the beginning of Spain’s replacement with another theocratic empire. The town and its pirates would follow another path, one focused more intensely on the individual than on the kingdom of belief.

  The English eventually hunted down the remaining guerrillas, and the invasion fleet dispersed to ports back in Europe. Some of the former soldiers settled down to lives as farmers; it was immediately clear that the island’s soil was rich, perhaps as rich as that of the fabulous moneymaker, Barbados. Still, in the early years the ex-soldiers and the other adventurers who were making the real money had turned to a new trade: privateering.

  Privateers were sailors from one nation who had been given permission by their monarchs, contained in documents called letters of marque—also called letters of commission, or simply commissions—to attack and capture enemy ships. Licensed marauders of the seas, they ranged from pirates simply looking for a tissue of legal protection to men who thought of themselves first and foremost as patriot soldiers. A pirate had no commission; he usually attacked anyone and everyone he came upon, regardless of nationality, and he was hanged on sight if captured and given no protection as a prisoner of war. Privateers were supposed to share their “purchase” (treasure) with the nation they represented; the English owed 10 percent to the lord admiral and 6 to the king. Pirates kept what they stole. Privateering was invented by a cash-strapped Henry VIII of England, who had no navy to attack the French (it having been sold by Parliament to pay his debts); he came up with the idea of issuing commissions to three private captains for the purpose of causing havoc with French shipping. Privateers were completely respectable; nobles often signed up when in a financial pinch.

  Piracy was much older and threaded through the history of all seafaring nations. Julius Caesar had been captured by pirates off the island of Pharmacusa and spent thirty-eight days gambling and declaiming his own verses with the corsairs; he joked that when he won his release, he would come back and crucify all of them, which the pirates found hilarious. When he’d bought his release, he quickly borrowed a fleet of ships, tracked down the pirates, and crucified them. St. Patrick was seized by pirates, who sold him as a slave in Ireland. On his return from his battles with the Turks, the ship of Miguel de Cervantes, later the author of Don Quixote, was intercepted by Barbary pirates, and he spent five miserable years as an Algerian captive, repeatedly attempting to escape.

  Who were the pirates of the West Indies? They were an assemblage of runaway slaves (the famous maroons), political refugees, disaffected sailors, indentured servants whose masters had tossed them off the plantation, hard-bitten adventure seekers, the flotsam and jetsam of the New World. They will play so vital a part in the coming battles, and they shared enough common characteristics and experiences, that it will clarify things to profile a typical pirate/privateer. There is enough information on the privateers who served under Morgan to give us a detailed composite picture of an average member, drawing from the experiences of various members of the Brethren of the Coast, as the pirates and privateers of the Caribbean were known. We shall call him Roderick.

  Roderick was nineteen years old, short (five foot four being a common height in those days), English (as most of Morgan’s men were), and unmarried—in one survey of Anglo-American pirates from 17
16 to 1726, only 4 percent had taken a wife. He was blue-eyed, lean, and quite strong for his size. Roderick had grown up in Dover, one of the great seaports of England, which were veritable factories for sailors and pirates. He went to the docks not only out of tradition (his father and grandfathers had earned their living on the water, rolling into their hovels after six long months away with tales of Morocco and Corsica) but because he had an itch for adventure and newness. He looked with astonishment on friends who became clerks or cobblers. One English sailor wrote that he “always had a mind to see strange countries and fashions,” while another said that his mind was “engrossed with voyages, the longer and more dangerous, the more attractive.” By signing up as a sailor, Roderick was already marking himself out as a breed apart. But when his merchant ship, undermanned by the owners in order to save money and pack more trade goods aboard, was spotted and captured by a pirate ship on its way to Barbados in 1660, Roderick faced a dilemma. He and his mates were brought out of the hold, marched up on deck to face the outlaw crew, and offered the chance to join up. They’d heard many tales of real-life pirates in the waterfront dens; who could resist the story of John Ward, a working-class English boy who had sailed off to Algiers, converted to Islam, assembled a pirate flotilla that could rival the Venetian navy, captured ship after ship loaded with spices and treasure, and built a palace of alabaster and marble where he lived out his life in unimaginable luxury? But the men who were lined up across from Roderick were more frightening than romantic. One had his eye shot out; another was missing an arm; a few had facial scars obviously left by a Spanish cutlass. They could hardly be called white men anymore, so blackened with the sun was their skin, so crisscrossed by their surprisingly delicate tattoos. The flint-lock pistols on silk strings that were their permanent accessories and their most prized possessions hung gaily around their necks, and their outré clothing—silks, damasks, and velvets in eye-smacking colors—announced the fact that their latest victim had been a French merchantman. Their captain gave a short, surprisingly persuasive speech. “We sing, sweare, drab, and kill men as freely as cakemakers do flies,” he boasted. “The whole sea is our empire where we rob at will.” Any man who joined up would get an equal share. All could vote on their missions and their policies. Toward the end he mentioned briefly that they’d be taking the ship’s carpenter, whether he was willing or not, as they’d lost their last one on a raid against a coastal town on the Spanish Main. But everyone else was free to choose.